A second federal prisoner scheduled to be put to death next month, as the Trump administration rushes to execute more people before Joe Biden takes power, has tested positive for Covid-19, his lawyers said on Friday.
Cory Johnson’s diagnosis came a day after attorneys for Dustin Higgs confirmed he had tested positive at a US prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where both men are on death row.
Johnson, Higgs and a third inmate, Lisa Montgomery, are scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection at the federal complex just days before Biden takes office.
The Trump administration resumed federal executions after a 17-year pause in July and has carried out 10 death sentences since then, including two last week. It has executed more people in a single year than any other administration in more than 130 years and this year has killed more inmates than all the states put together.
Johnson’s lawyers, Donald Salzman and Ronald Tabak, called on federal authorities to strike their client’s current execution date of 14 January – six days before inauguration day. Higgs is scheduled to die a day later.
Montgomery’s execution date is 12 January, but because she is the only woman on federal death row she is held at a separate prison in Texas and would need to be brought to Indiana to be executed. She would be the first woman killed by the US government in 67 years.
Johnson’s attorneys said his infection would make it difficult to interact with him in the critical days leading up to his scheduled execution, adding: “The widespread outbreak on the federal death row only confirms the reckless disregard for the lives and safety of staff, prisoners, and attorneys alike.”
“If the government will not withdraw the execution date, we will ask the courts to intervene,” they said.
The US Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons did not respond to requests for comment.
Prosecutors alleged Johnson was a crack cocaine dealer who killed seven people in 1992 in an attempt to expand the territory of a Richmond, Virginia, gang and silence informants. His legal team has argued that he is intellectually disabled, with a far below average IQ, and therefore ineligible for the death penalty.
Higgs was convicted of ordering the 1996 murders of three women in Maryland. Montgomery was convicted of using a rope to strangle a pregnant woman in 2004 and then using a kitchen knife to cut the baby girl from the womb, authorities said.
The Bureau of Prisons confirmed in a statement on Thursday that inmates on federal death row have tested positive for Covid-19. As of Thursday, there were more than 300 inmates with confirmed cases at FCC Terre Haute. The Bureau of Prisons said “many of these inmates are asymptomatic or exhibiting mild symptoms”.
Nationwide, one in every five state and federal prisoners has tested positive for the coronavirus, a rate more than four times as high as the general population, according to data collected by the Associated Press and the Marshall Project.